Jill DuffyFinal DraftFinal Draft is the software you need if you are in the screenwriting business or aspire to be. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, both from a story perspective and a technical one.

Well tailored for screenwriters. Powerful tools for both writing scenes and crafting the larger story. Plenty of view options. Offers a variety of templates. Collaboration supported.

Cons

Collaborative editing restricted to one person at a time. Inadequate default auto-save and revision history.

Bottom Line

Final Draft is the software you need if you are in the screenwriting business or aspire to be. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, both from a story perspective and a technical one.

Professional screenwriters use Final Draft, and you should too if that's your field. It's one of the best apps for writers in general, and it's the app for screenwriters. Only Final Draft has smart auto-suggestion features for formatting your work to industry standards. It compiles lists of characters and scene locations automatically. A Beat Board feature replicates the old notecard-and-corkboard approach to arranging scenes, and a Story Map helps keep the story on target for pacing and script length. Among writing apps, it's one of the most expensive products you can buy, but it's well worth the price. Final Draft is a PCMag Editors' Choice for software for screenwriters.

Similar Products

If you're not primarily a screenwriter, there are two other apps worth investigating because they have some advantages for novelists and book authors. They are Scrivener, which is available for both Windows and OS X computers, and the Mac-only Ulysses. They're also Editors' Choice products.

Price and Platform

Final Draft is available for Mac, Windows, and iOS. There is no Android app. At $249.99, the desktop software is not cheap, but the good news is that with a purchase, you can install Final Draft on two machines.

The installation process is very easy. Anyone can install Final Draft and try it for 30 days without having to lay down a credit card. If you buy the app, you get a license code via email that you enter the next time you launch it.

The iOS app sells separately for $9.99. It's worth adding if you are the type of writer who is always jotting down ideas and notes to add to your scripts. If you use the iOS app and save your work to an online storage service, such as Dropbox, then you can make notes right in your script no matter where you are.

Among mobile apps, ten bucks might sound a little pricey, but it's not bad among writing apps. Plus, it's a one-time fee rather than a recurring subscription price, and the latter is increasingly becoming the norm for productivity and office software.

Other writing apps charge less for their desktop editions, but more for their mobile apps. Scrivener, for example, costs $45 for the Windows or OS X app and $19.99 for the iOS app. Scrivener offers a household license with a single purchase, as long as all the computers are the same platform. In other words, you can pay $45 for the Mac app and install it on all the Macs in your house, but you'll have to buy a second copy if you need to need to use it on Windows.

Ulysses costs about the same, $44.99, but it is for Mac only and you only get one installation with purchase. Ulysses for iOS will run you $24.99.

There are less expensive writing apps, but they aren't nearly as sophisticated as any of the ones I've mentioned so far. iA Writer (for Mac), for instance, is much cheaper, but because it's positioned as a distraction-free writing tool, it doesn't have much to it. It doesn't have libraries or other tools for organizing your writing into chapters or acts and scenes. It's more of a typing app, really, with a few neat features and export capabilities.

WriteRoom is another inexpensive Mac-only app that aims to eliminate distractions. It lets you type to your heart's content in a minimalist editor, but you can't easily map out storyboards, automatically have lists of characters and scenes created for you, do anything else that's more advanced that you can do with Final Draft.

Final Draft Basics

Final Draft's strength is that it helps screenwriters format their scripts to industry standards. In the film and television industries, everyone on the production needs to be able to look at a script and immediately know what's a line of dialogue, versus action, versus a description of a shot, and so forth. It's all done through rudimentary formatting. Before a line of dialogue, you'll see a character name in all caps centered on the page. Scene settings are written using standard abbreviations, like INT. for interior and EXT. for exterior. Final Draft makes it dead simple to get this formatting right.

As you type, Final Draft intuits what type of line you're writing and offers appropriate suggestions for both formatting and auto-fill. For example, let's say two characters, Liz and Jack, have both spoken one line to each other. Final Draft might guess that there will be another line of dialogue back because it's Liz's turn to respond. The app will automatically center your next line and use app caps to suggest "LIZ." If that's right, you can hit enter to accept it and move along. If the suggestion is incorrect, you can keep typing the correct information and format it appropriately using a selector that's always available at the bottom of the screen.

As you type character names and format them correctly so that Final Draft knows they're characters, all the names get compiled into a list, which appears in a separate window. This window, called the Navigator, contains other metadata, such as an automatically compiled list of scene settings as well as notes you write for yourself about each scene. You can customize the Navigator to give more detailed information, such as the pages on which different characters have dialogue. You can also add nonspeaking characters to the list of people who appear in the scene, since those roles aren't added automatically.

More Features for Screenwriters

Another selling point of Final Draft for professional screenwriters is that it has specific templates you can use to get started. Do you need to format your script in the traditional Cole and Haag style, or do you want to use the Warner Brothers format? If you're working in the genre of musical theater, you'll have different needs, and those can be met with the Dramatists Guild Musical template. There are templates for a few types of graphic novels, a half-hour sitcom, a one-hour TV drama, and even a novel.

So far, I've touched on some of the basic features of writing the script itself. Final Draft has areas within the app for crafting the work structurally, too. The Story Map and Beat Board features give you room to play around with structure, scene order, and pace.

The Story Map shows up as a timeline in the toolbar, just above the standard ruler you might see in any word processing application. The Story Map shows the length of your script in pages, as well as your current position among those pages. The Beat Board replicates what screenwriters sometimes do with notecards on a corkboard. You jot out scene summaries on cards (in Final Draft, they're auto-generated from what you've already typed), and you move them around until you lock down their order.

I really like how the Beat Board and Story Map can work together. Let's say you need to make sure that the first twist in your plot occurs by page 7. From the Beat Board, you can drag a scene card up to page 7 in the Story Map timeline to mark that goal.

Another neat feature, created with comedy writers in mind, lets you add alternative dialogue for any line. Comedy writers are known for leaving some room to ad-lib in scripts, and this feature lets you record options that come to mind during the writing process or when editing during a table read. When you save more than one option for a line in Final Draft, you see a small number noted next to the line. Arrows let you read the options. Plus and minus icons let you add more options or delete existing ones.

Final Draft offers plenty of options for how you can view your script. I mentioned that the Story Map timeline appears in the toolbar, but you have the option to hide it, too. Split screen views, which let you write in one window while referring to other parts of your script in a second window, can be either vertical or horizontal. There are other views, too, that let you see the pages with or without page numbers, page breaks, and other components.

Room for Improvement

While Final Draft is one of the best pieces of software for writers, and especially screenwriters, it still trails other productivity apps and office software in some ways. I've been surprised to learn that most apps for writers are sold as one-time purchases, rather than as subscriptions. On the one hand, it's less expensive. On the other hand, you don't get all the perks that typically come with a recurring fee, like included storage, faster support, and so forth.

Many writers work with a writer partner or even on a writing team, making support for collaboration a desirable feature. Not many writing apps offer it at all, but Final Draft does. Unfortunately, instead of the real-time co-authoring many people have grown accustomed to in Google Docs and other office software, Final Draft has a weak implementation.

To collaborate, all the collaborators must own a copy of Final Draft. Then one person starts a session by generating a code. That lead author must give the code to the other collaborators for them to join. When more than one person has joined the session, a chat box appears for communication. You're going to need it because only one person can have editing permission at a time. So it's asynchronous and therefore slower, and frankly users should demand something better because live co-authoring is hardly anything new.

Another disappointment is the way Final Draft handles saves. I was on a plane recently when a flight attendant reminded everyone to "save your work" before closing laptops in preparation for landing. I chuckled out loud. "Who 'saves' anything anymore?" I thought. Apparently, if you work in Final Draft, you do. An auto-save function is on by default, but it only saves every 15 minutes! The first time I used the app, I got about 13 minutes into my work when it crashed. Everything I had typed was gone. The best you can do with the auto-save function is reconfigure it to back up your work every three minutes. That's still weak in my mind, compared to productivity apps—including plain old word processors—that sync and back up your work with every keystroke.

Furthermore, if you want to see revision histories, you'll have to make sure the auto-backup feature is enabled. It saves a copy of your work to a local folder on your computer every few minutes, and by default it saves only the most recent 100. If you want to restore one of them, you have to open that file separately. Ulysses and iA Writer both have a better version history features that let you easily see and restore previous copies of your work without leaving the app interface.

Despite these letdowns, Final Draft is still better and more advanced than most other writing apps. The category of writing apps as a whole has a long way to go to catch up with other software.

The Best App for Screenwriters

You should own a copy of Final Draft if you are actively working (or seeking work) as a creator in the world of film and television. Sure, Scrivener has templates for screenplays, but only Final Draft has smart tools for formatting your work to professional specifications. It also offers spaces to help you craft stories, like the Story Map and Beat Board. It's not a perfect app, but it's definitely in the top three among software for writers, and a clear Editors' Choice for screenwriting.

If screenwriting isn't your primary gig, Scrivener and Ulysses, our other Editors' Choice writing apps, may be more palatable options because they cost one-fifth of the price and have all the right tools for writing novels, short stories, and other genres.

Final Draft

excellent

Bottom Line: Final Draft is the software you need if you are in the screenwriting business or aspire to be. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, both from a story perspective and a technical one.

About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

Final Draft

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